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Cleaning Your Computer With an Electronic Duster
Getting frustrated with how long it takes to boot up your computer these days? Hard drive space becoming scarce? Wondering why your computer is slow ? It might be time to do a little house cleaning on your computer. You'd be surprised how much of a difference a few little simple clean up jobs can make. A hard drive with too little space is detrimental to your system in two ways: all your programs will take longer to load, and your computer actually uses your free hard drive space as temporary memory. all In a few easy steps, you can free up a great deal of hard drive space and also speed up your computer.
Disk Cleanup
Disk cleanup is a good place to get started. Go into your Start menu, select Programs, and choose Accessories. From there you should see System Tools. Under the System Tools tab should be a Disk Cleanup icon. Select the icon. Under Windows Vista, you may be asked which drive you wish to clean up. This is usually going to be the C drive. Give this process a while to complete. When it's done, you should see that a good chunk of space has been freed up.
Remove Old Programs
Next in our list of clean up options should be assessing what programs we need, and which ones we can afford to toss overboard. To do this, head to the Add/Remove programs menu. In your Start menu, go to Control Panel, and Add or Remove Programs. Try ordering the programs by size, so you know what's taking up most of your space. If you see something you don't use anymore, consider removing it. This could potentially free up a large amount of space. Make sure you remove programs through the Add/Remove programs interface. Simply deleting a program's folder can leave remnants of the application all over your computer.
It's very easy to clutter up a computer with files and programs that are no longer being used. It can also seem very difficult to get a handle on what is actually on your computer sometimes. The Add/Remove programs menu is the simplest, most direct way of assessing what's hogging your computer's space.
Although it may seem you need a larger hard drive, it's a pretty safe bet that you probably have a great deal of unused stuff on that hard drive. Instead of spending hundreds of dollars for an even larger drive, pick and choose what you need to keep and what can go.
If you still don't have enough space, there are other options for freeing up space. Windows consumes a considerable amount of hard drive space creating Restore Points. Although Restore Points can be an important feature if you need to rollback your computer, they also take up a lot of space. Windows can take up as much as 15% of your drive's space creating Restore Points. On my computer, turning off Restore Points gave back about 14 GB of space. To do this, go to Start, Programs, Accessories, System Tools, and Restore Points (System Resore in Win XP). From there, go to Settings, click a drive (if you have more than one) and click Settings again. Reduce the slider to your desired size for system resotre points. You also have an option to completely turn it off.
Taking a proactive stance in managing your hard drive space can keep open space available and reduce the strain on your computer's hard drive.
Tips courtesy of www.slowcomputerhelp.com , which sells an ebook on Windows PC fixes .